Page 4. James Cook

The English in the Pacific

The first Englishman to sail the Pacific, Francis Drake,
crossed it from east to west during his 1577–80
circumnavigation of the globe. Subsequent English interest in
the Pacific, like Drake’s own, grew from England’s imperial
rivalries with Spain, Holland and France. It was only a
little before James Cook’s first voyage, which placed New
Zealand definitively on the map, that English ships began to
approach the south-west Pacific. John Byron’s voyage of
1764–66 is generally considered the beginning of serious
English interest in the Pacific. In 1767 Samuel Wallis was
the first European to discover Tahiti.

A new expedition

By the time Wallis returned to England in May 1768,
another expedition to the Pacific was already being
organised. The Royal Society had proposed to the Admiralty
that the transit of Venus (the passage of Venus across the
face of the sun) could be observed in the South Pacific. The
observation would make it possible to accurately calculate
distances from the Earth to both Venus and the sun. When
Wallis returned with news of his discovery of Tahiti, the
expedition was instructed to go there to make the
observations.

Lieutenant James Cook was appointed to command the
expedition. In his youth Cook had been a sailor in the North
Sea coal trade. After enlisting in the navy he served for 10
years in North American waters, taking part in the capture of
Quebec in 1759, and refining his skills and compiling charts
as surveyor of Newfoundland. In 1768 he was approaching 40
and still engaged in the Newfoundland survey, when he was
given the job of commanding the South Pacific expedition.

The expedition’s purposes

Once the planetary observations had been made, the
expedition was to investigate if there was land to the south
of Tahiti. The voyagers were then to turn west towards
Tasman’s New Zealand, to establish how far it extended to the
east. They were also to establish where Australia’s eastern
coastline lay.

The goals of the voyage were apparently scientific,
inspired by a quest for knowledge typical of the
Enlightenment. Because of this emphasis, Cook’s voyage has
often been thought of more favourably than Tasman’s, yet the
English, like the Dutch, also wished to expand trade and
empire. The British Empire was flush with its recent success
in the Seven Years’ War with France, and had political,
strategic and economic expansion in its sights. Cook was
careful to include in his reports information about the
resources of the lands he visited, and the suitability of
those lands for settlement by Britain.